Own your data, explore open-source tools,
and build your personal digital ecosystem.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is the gateway drug of self-hosting, and a used 8th or 9th gen i3 office desktop is what I moved to. Here is the honest comparison, price, power, performance, Quick Sync transcoding and the one thing the Pi does that the i3 never will.
Your public server is being probed right now. The hardening checklist I run on every machine, SSH keys and firewalls and CrowdSec and non-root containers, in the order I apply it, before something else finds the gap first.
A records, CNAMEs, wildcards, MX, TTL and split DNS explained the way I needed them explained, before a domain panel stopped looking like a cockpit and started looking like the most powerful page on the internet.
A new RIPE Labs study shows email consolidating around two providers, and the takes write themselves. I have run my own mail server for two years, and the numbers describe a trend, while my inbox describes a choice.
I added up what my self-hosted stack replaced and what it costs to run, hardware and electricity and my time included. The number surprised me, and not only in the way you would expect.
Joplin keeps your notes as plain markdown files that sync across devices without a server in the middle. Pair it with Syncthing and a decade of notes becomes a folder you own, encrypted, searchable and immune to shutdowns.